The article talks about the amounts spent on workplace learning in outraged tones. To those who work within the private sector, particularly in larger organisations, these amounts are pretty standard. Indeed they are often considered par for the course and a part of keeping employees engaged, skilled and motivated. It’s interesting to see that these amounts are somehow a waste when they are tax payer funds. I tend to wonder if the writer has ever attended a course like that in the course of their career? Why is it unacceptable for public servants to recieve this kind of development opportunity but fine as long as it’s not from the public purse?

Perception of the value of “soft-skills” training

This was a real eye-opener for me as a learning practitioner. I realise that a lot of people make fun of workplace learning, especially courses such as emotional intelligence (which is particularly targeted in the article), but this was the first time that I have ever read someone actually articulating their contempt of so called “soft skills” courses. Sure, some of them are a bit…well…dodgy, but there are a lot that do a lot of good. I fail to see how management and leadership training aligned to business and individual needs can be a bad thing no matter who is paying. This brings me to my next point…

Why don’t public servants deserve the same development and engagement perks that private sector employees enjoy?

This seems an important question for me. The article focuses on public servants and hinges on the argument that this sort of workplace learning is not an appropriate use of tax payer funds. I agree with this in principle. The current government is asking a lot of people in their budget and it must seem that they need to get their own house in order so to speak if only from a perception point of view. My issue, which obviously we can’t tell from this article, is whether these learning initiaives were targeted and well planned and executed or whether they were just there to keep people happy and use up training budgets (not that anyone would every do that – guffaw). In the private sector there may not be tax payers but there are often shareholders – they seem to have cottoned on to the fact that nothing gets done without the staff but not so the public service. I wonder what would happen if shareholders suddenly started to take more of an interest in the learning and development? Would there be a knee-jerk reaction about waste and no development would occur or would they realise that it’s an important cost of doing business that could perhaps be better targeted in many cases?

Basically I think that this article has led me to the conclusion that we need to ask more questions about what we offer as practitioners, and as managers. No surprises there! Are we getting the best “bang for our buck”? Are we offering targeted development solutions that actually offer a need or are we just trying to look good or spend the budget? It’s interesting to get an outsider’s view on this as presented in the SMH article. It might do us all good to take this sort of view when we’re asked for a development imtervention or we want to organise something for our staff.

Back when I was an internal learning specialist (i.e. before I was a manager and had people to do this for me 😉 ), I developed a brief template to help me determine what the manager was actually after when they requested something nebulous like a “team building day” or some “communication skills training”. Here are the questions in summary (based loosely on the GROW model from my last post) that should help learning practitioners to work out what’s needed and also help managers better brief learning practitioners and consultants.

What are the session objectives? What skills/knowledge/attitudes do you want participants to have at the end of the session?

What do you want the team/group/individuals to be able to do or think differently afterwards? Are you open to follow-up activities?

Is the session part of an overall conference/course/offsite? If so, how does it fit into the overall event?

What’s the budget and any time constraints? (I once was asked to run a half-day session on the Friday afternoon of a long weekend when many participants had early flights home which puts rather a dent in your time allocation!)

Where is the venue? What resources are available at the venue (including space as well as AV, etc)?